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FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE Release Notes

Release Highlights

The highlights in the 7.2-RELEASE are the following:

[amd64, i386] The FreeBSD virtual memory subsystem now
supports fully transparent use of superpages for application memory;
application memory pages are dynamically promoted to or
demoted from superpages without any modification to
application code. This change offers the benefit of large page
sizes such as improved virtual memory efficiency and reduced
TLB (translation lookaside buffer) misses without downsides
like application changes and virtual memory
inflexibility. This is disabled by default and can be enabled
by setting a loader tunable vm.pmap.pg_ps_enabled to 1.

[amd64] The FreeBSD kernel virtual address space has been
increased to 6GB. This allows subsystems to use larger virtual
memory space than before. For example, zfs(8) adaptive
replacement cache (ARC) requires large kernel memory space to
cache file system data, so it benefits from the increased
address space. Note that the ceiling on the kernel map size is
now 60% of the size rather than an absolute quantity.

Multiple addresses of both IPv4 and IPv6 per jail has
been supported. It is even possible to have jails without
an IP address at all, which basically gives one a chrooted
environment with restricted process view and no
networking.

Specific CPU binding by using cpuset(1) has
been implemented. Note that the current implementation
allows the superuser inside of the jail to change the
CPU bindings specified. This behavior will be fixed in
the next release.